I like the idea of photographs outside the Temple Mill. It would be a good place to start the walk, and end it there too maybe. (From the temple up to the Park Row banking street and then back?)

It works well how Leeds is a financial city and is also home to an old factory modelled on an Egyptian temple.



I was originally thinking about wearing a suit, but Rory said that it would be too theatrical and it should be me being me doing the performance and at the time that made sense. Now I'm wondering if a suit would work, but I'm not sure why. I'm not pretending to be a banker but it feels like it would make sense. Maybe just being dressed in a smart shirt and trousers would be enough?





I’m not sure. I do know that I should do the ‘performance’ again, this time involving the ‘temple’ as well as the banks, but i'm undecided on what to wear.

The way i present the images of the 'Bank Blessings' is very important. The way I see it, there are two directions i could go down. I can present the imagery in a traditional ancient Egyptian style which would relate to the use of the heron, or I could present it in an executive “banking” style, a brochure or power point perhaps.

(See Alexandre Singh's 'Casual Magick' overhead projector piece - really nice and simple, but very considered and works really well)
http://www.artreview.com/artistInResidence

Each idea is very different and i have to think carefully which to go for.

I need to look at my work anthropologically. Anthropology is the study of human beings everywhere and throughout time. It asks interesting and useful questions like:

"How has the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens influenced its social organization and culture?"

Alfred Gell was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell's theories offer new possibilities for the cross-cultural study of art, which can be applied not only to the art of small-scale oral societies but also to Western art history.

From what I gathered from this, if we understand more about other cultures we can find similarities between theirs and ours and create art that communicates to a wider audience. Appealing to other cultures is very important since globalisation and now "altermodernism".

I finally got round to doing my backlit projections. I borrowed a projector from the AV dungeon, bought some tracing paper, stuck it to the inside of my bedroom window and set up the projector.




It was relatively easy to do; I hadn’t used a projector before and managed to set it up quite quickly.




I really wanted to do this because it was a way of showing work to a probable none art audience.



This is the view from the window I was projecting from. I know it looks like a futuristic, apocalyptic nightmare, but it’s only Holbeck in the background. The big blue building is an office block, with quite a few people working late. The building to the left is the rest of the apartment block.


The projection is also visible from the road… just.

This is quite a subtle piece as it’s quite high up perhaps hardly visible. I’m not sure whether it worked very well because I’m not sure if anyone saw it. If they did, it would only look like an abstract, fuzzy distortion which is kind of what I wanted.



After messing around with it and playing different videos I decided that the one that worked best was the none figurative, flickering distortion video. There is no dialogue or human interaction, it is what it is; a minimal, colourful moving image.

I do quite like the idea of it being subtle and perhaps unnoticeable.

Anyway I left it on late into the night (as my audience got smaller and smaller) until the noise and heat from the projector became too much to sleep next to.

Whether anyone got anything from this projection is a mystery. For it to work better (by which I mean reach a larger audience), it would have to be on a lower floor or done on a larger scale.


An artist that does large scale projections well is Ross Ashton. He projects images onto large buildings. They are often very celebratory and architectural. They reach a large audience because there’s often a large crowd there to see something else, e.g. the Queen’s golden Jubilee, Edinburgh Military Tattoo, St Patrick’s Day.



I like his stuff but it’s not really what I’m going for. It’s very broad, but I suppose it has to be if it’s part of a large celebration, most of which are televised. The audience most likely isn’t into art, or at least isn’t there for the art, and want something obvious and beautiful.

In this “performance” I use the heron to refer to the ancient Egyptian belief system. The heron symbolises a god which brings prosperity. At one time, the shape of a heron was worshipped as a shrine to a god, now it’s used as a deterrent to keep herons away from ponds. This interested me, and relates to how different people interpret things differently. This is a slightly extreme example as the two different perceptions of the shape are separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years.

I thought it would be interesting to use its sculptural symbology in a religious context once again. It was once believed to bring prosperity and because of the current financial climate I felt the need to explore this. I blessed the banking system with a visit from an ancient god.
It wasn’t important whether people who saw me understood what I was doing, that’s immaterial. It’s about me believing that this bird, this religious act will solve the recession.
This raises questions about belief. The fact that it’s a belief system that no longer exists is important because it’s obvious to an outsider that it won’t work. It wouldn’t have the same effect if it was a blessing from an existing religion because enough people would believe it would work. The piece becomes about the futility and impracticality of belief.

I got quite a few funny looks because it was so out of place for a high street. If I were doing this on a Friday night on the Otley Run it would have had a completely different affect. One reason being because I’d be surrounded by people more elaborately dressed and would look relatively tame in comparison. Another reason being (which is closely linked to the first) I would be viewed by a totally different audience. It’s all about context.

It’s quite interesting how all these people in the street won’t have had the foggiest what I was doing or what it meant, but this doesn’t matter. The pieces are the photographs taken from the performance; these will then be subjected to a totally different audience. These photos still need explaining though, it’s not immediate what this piece is about, compared to my ‘Dreamdish’ and ‘Urban Bird Boxes’ which were pretty self explanatory.

There seems to be a trend of healing emerging in my work. I seem to have an impulse to make things that are somehow beneficial. The bird boxes take the noisy traffic sounds and turn them into calming birdsong, the Dreamdish heals people as they watch their TVs by bringing their attention to the filtering of the media and the Bank Blessing attempt at healing the economy.
I was wondering where this attitude fitted in with the greater scheme of art. I read that a modernist attitude was to right the wrongs of the world, which got me slightly worried. I thought that my concepts might be over fifty years out of date, but Marcus Coates does similar work about shamanism and belief so perhaps it’s an “alter modern” attitude, which was more comforting.